The Solana community has made a significant decision, with a resounding 77% majority voting to allocate 100% of priority fees to the network's validators.

Previously, Solana's priority fees were evenly divided between rewarding validators and the token-burning mechanism of the Solana network.

Despite its robust price performance, Solana has been grappling with congestion issues and network crashes. Since the end of 2023, the token has seen a surge in price, reaching a peak of approximately $210 in March 2024 and currently trading around $171.

However, Solana has experienced several notable network outages. The first occurred in September 2021 due to bots exacerbating network congestion, leading to a 17-hour downtime. Subsequent crashes followed in December 2021 and later that month due to high traffic and network congestion caused by SolChick's game token sale, respectively. Another major outage hit in 2023, attributed to network traffic and issues with validator software upgrades.

Despite these challenges, Solana continues to demonstrate remarkable transaction throughput, setting a record of 1,504 transactions per second (TPS) on April 6, 2024, according to CoinGecko. This places Solana as the fastest blockchain network, far surpassing Ethereum's current layer-1 speed.

The decision to redirect priority fees to validators reflects the community's efforts to address network stability and incentivize validators amid Solana's rapid growth and increasing transaction volume. As Solana continues to evolve, these measures aim to strike a balance between scalability and reliability in supporting its cutting-edge transaction throughput.